Transcript Remarks - Home | Governance of Climate Change Finance for Asia

Welcome Remarks
By Deputy Director General
Department of Local Administration
Ministry of Interior, Thailand
Tuesday 30th October 2012
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
It is my great pleasure to be here today and to welcome
all delegates of the Asia-Pacific Local Practitioners and
Climate Change Finance Workshop: Implications of Local
Governance and Decentralisation for the effective
delivery of finance for climate change at the local level”
to Thailand.
I would like to congratulate the organisers, UNDP, UNCDF
and UNEP, for bringing over 90 participants from 12
countries in Asia-Pacific to this important event.
This includes government officials in both Central level
and Local level, representatives from Civil Service
Organisations, Regional and International organisations
as well as development partners.
It is a great opportunity for all stakeholders to meet and
to exchange their experience on Local Governance,
Decentralisation and Climate Change Finance and to
discuss ways to take the issues forward together.
Department of Local Administration, Ministry of
Interior has played a crucial role in supporting
Decentralisation and its implementation on the ground
across the country.
From its starting day over 10 years ago, Thailand’s local
governance reforms are still work in progress. We have
seen great progress at local level administration in better
public participation, better budget utilisation and
transparency and so forth.
There are a number of challenges we have faced and
there also are many opportunities to enhance our local
governance’s capacity toward sustainable development
and self-dependency.
The current 5-year National Economic and Social
Development Plan has put climate change as one of the
6 pillars of its mandate.
Thailand sets our vision to move ourselves towards a
low-carbon and climate resilient development pathway.
The policy framework and institutional set-up to
enhance Thailand’s readiness to respond to climate
change is building up.
But it is crucial to also look into the fiscal and financial
measures to turn this vision into reality and actions on
the ground.
Earlier this year, Thailand completed a Climate Public
Expenditures and Institutional reviews (CPEIR).
One of the key recommendations is to ask the government
in all relevant agencies to coordinate among themselves
better on ways in which to deliver climate finance.
We would like to emphasize that the coalition should not
lie only at the central government level but it’s very
important, at local level, to encourage the local
government agencies to coordinate among themselves
better and to integrate their works to ensure that the local
level administration goes in the same direction.
Moreover, the study about public expenditure and
institutional management concerned climate change
revealed that the local government organisations in
Thailand realized about climate change situation but
their investment and activities are still explicit.
Therefore, to enhance the local executives to have
knowledge and necessary skills including technical
support from ministries will make local government
organisations which are legally independent be able to
initiate and develop suitable projects to locality with
subsidy or grant from non-government organisations,
foundations or private development organisations.
Climate Change and local government is not a new topic
because it affects people’s everyday lives.
We are looking forward to share our experiences and hear
from others through discussions and lessons learnt from
this regional workshop to bring home solid
recommendations to help strengthen our local
governance.
I wish you all the pleasant stay in Thailand and I do wish
you a dynamic, productive and successful dialogue.
Thank you very much.